To be so far apart from what needs mewhile a spool releases silky emerald threadyou loop a loop of it on cream cheese
no one can tell the eaten from the future
to mix ribbons in with your rice, a car
running through the vly in hip-high mud
you affirm a Calvinist principle even as
your bed is burning below the underpass
the shunts of population dismay classicists
stardust is actual enough the problem is harps
to hear it, Aeolian extravaganzas a priest
in Portugal praying for a cold white egg
between the cheeks of his beloved, agree
with your impulses before they candle
and there the night is ruined with gold
gleam upon oil a translator comes home
mess rich with latin lipids a blue hair
looped around your argentine hour
(hair, hour, hour, hair, who are there
who kiss the long triangulars of narrative
sauntering Tiergarten one tall gold girl)
back from the war striations of belief
cheesing their way through dull wax
‘marble that seemed to be on fire’
was there an answer only a humming
when the book was opened as if owls
had recently flown past and bees remembered
shadow governments by neat procedures
forget everything that can be lost is lost
kayak under trestle wooden sleeper grazes
tall type in a canoe slug in a turnstile
halfway to Verona there is a mountain
too close to the trains the cosines are wrong
but the geometry of morning still works
the shadows fall the shades go up the woman
stands at the window inspecting her reflection
ghosting in the glass before the whole street
this is the first story in the history of things
a woman with a looking glass man with rock
the Spanish Encyclopedia is full of sand
there could have been two of them
light poles sulfur Denver kerosene
by prairie dog village past the diner
out of business now it snows early
in most places sometime define
a simple adhesive pleasure to work
like you beside me on the glider
we are who we will always be I guess
dockets stuffed with earlier transcriptions
(ranunculus? surfboard? ‘the woman
asks herself a couple questions’ title
of my book) original or organdy a hurricane
out of season would you like a parrot
my birth was a beast and a forgetting
born into this world thinking I am you
praying you to make the same mistake
safely the Monday of it the because, so bleak
by weeks to measure the deciding ghost
whose harrowed chariot by Oldsmobile drugged
into the unspeakable condition he morphed
from sleep into public proclamation who is that
up there with his hips around his knees
mouthing the mercies who is that with language
choking the little sense left to be made
anywhere any hour American wilderness and if
a poet can’t identify a wolf who can since they
invented me to parade in bishop’s weeds aloft
prancing on the catwalks of their greed
until guttering tea-lights drive the plaster crazy
making signals on the wall the flutter hurts
the flimsy skin of reason round the eyes
can barely see the waitress sing the specials
so it was a matter of knowing for whom the weasel
popped wasn’t it not some metaphysical retreat
fashioned of beech leaves and Heidegger o no
as cummings once famously insisted spelling it
different in a way we can’t any more because of Yoko
you who remember Chambers Street and Higgins
can hardly object to my noncical trivial bass flute
harping on the recent and the said, naked
naked naked as a text without its commentary
these antisemite animals that hate analysis
when all is solving up and going down a god
given gavel rapping in the skull to punctuate
the stupid single meanings of the world and let
them pullulate until the cows come sagely home
into the stone barn built before the universe
full of good intentions I beg you milk my book
a word swells up until it hurts you need to drain
the wordbag mama all those saxon nibbles count
to suck the bee-sting venom of all history out Amen
most nights I sleep on the other side of dream
healed in black nirvana that wakes up for breakfast
and there all the people are who make sudden need
to reparticipate in that which dreams me
why can’t I dream of what gives pleasure?
Exhausted porters bring my body home
green fever took me and I slept the lake
talked to me constantly using little words
so we could learn them this is water
what it says and light and animals all of them
just one single word sometimes my dream
let me go and I spoke what I remembered
to my grieving wife I would never be the same
Kingston city of surprises dog asleep in sun
taste ink on the nib of a pen last dipped in Vienna
a name’s as good as any other lie mensonges
de la lune be brief with me senators I have to get
back to ruling long sheets of paper with pale feints
man proposes woman exposes cherry trees made
at last safe from hares a postcard big as a burn
licks the color off your eyes and whispers thanks
on cloudless Sabbaths a new geometry of malls
rinsed clean of laughter the sky is one long ad
for the complex lucidity of your skin how it does
some shadows fall and do not leave a kiss
the color of tea all I ask is you imagine me
half past meaning on the way to speed magical
apertures all yours the night is just a glamorous
lie a soft shirt I thought I took off long ago
far past all interpretations there are glazes and blue frits
baskerville pushing narrow gutters to spill a wide sestina
so many things I want to pull from the chronicle of skin
to read to you amid the sunken cathedral in my anxious whisper
my whole life has no other purpose than to make you hear
the ring forts of Atlantis each one a different color piled
like quoits around the middle pillar of the world the town
inside the city in our bones these nice bodies of ours the ocean
swallowed down the wisdom city we keep looking for.
(in Peaches and Bats 2)
